


Max Them OFF

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [31]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pacific Rim (2013), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Codependency, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 17:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5710891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many debates when they are finally issued a Jaeger. Two word names are common (Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, Striker Eureka, all well-known) but the names they come up with were not. The technicians and engineers like Quicksilver for the Jaeger; they’d built it for speed, given the twins’ youth, and it shines in shades of grey and silver as it awaits its paintjob. Pietro doesn’t like the name much, however, and Wanda doesn’t much mind, so Pietro is allowed to make the final decision.</p><p>He is grinning like a maniac when he suggests “Max Them OFF”. Wanda laughs, and sighs, and agrees, “So long as we can simplify it to Max when we’re out.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Max Them OFF

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this idea for a while, and it was asked for a while back on my tumblr as part of the prompts thing, so I decided to finally finish it up.

They are tested early on, when the Jaegers are first being built. Everyone at their orphanage already knew they were uncommonly close, and after other sets of siblings, twins, and even some triplets, had entered the Jaeger programme, their closeness brings the note of the military. They do well on singular tests, and better together, and when asked to spar and plan, they work together in a way that is almost like a dance. They complete the training asked of them more quickly than any other pair.

They are not yet fifteen.

They are _good_. Pietro’s tendency to let his sister do what she pleases as long as he can defend her means their back is always watched, and Wanda’s ability to come up with complex flexible plans that paid attention not just to the speed of their Jaeger but also their weapons and personal skills makes them able to deal with new problems on the fly. Wanda knows them both with a skill that some of the technicians called unnatural, but with time she comes to know their skills almost as well, and the techs decide she is simply very good at understanding people.

(They never quite understand Pietro’s speed).

There are many debates when they are finally issued a Jaeger. Two word names are common (Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, Striker Eureka, all well-known) but the names they come up with were not. The technicians and engineers like Quicksilver for the Jaeger; they’d built it for speed, given the twins’ youth, and it shines in shades of grey and silver as it awaits its paintjob. Pietro doesn’t like the name much, however, and Wanda doesn’t much mind, so Pietro is allowed to make the final decision.

He is grinning like a maniac when he suggests “Max Them OFF”. Wanda laughs, and sighs, and agrees, “So long as we can simplify it to Max when we’re out.”  

The techs paint it both gold and silver after that.

 

* * *

 

The twins are fast. They are usually sent out against the smaller Kaiju, but sometimes they work with another team on a larger one, providing two enemies, two targets. They make it a light quick dance, and become known for their assists.

By the time they are seventeen they are as renowned as any other Jaeger pilots.

 

* * *

 

When her brother is torn from the Jaeger she feels it, every inch, as the wires and cable and metal of their safety is taken apart. She feels their suits try to compensate, feels the metal burning into her skin, branding circuits down her arm, and she _screams_ , so loud and full of pain she thinks it sets off the siren, a huge and shrieking thing, scarlet lighting the chamber, flashing into the ocean through the gaping hole.

She is not sure if it is her flailing in the Jaeger or her scream which bursts the Kaiju’s chest open, just that it does. A great spurt of Kaiju Blue sprays into the ocean, and the creature crumples, and falls, waves washing over it as it sinks down and down and down.

Wanda is slumped in her harness. She cannot care. She cannot care, not about anything. She felt the last thoughts of Pietro’s mind as he was torn from the Jaeger, the screaming litany of _nononoWandapleasenonoNONONON-_

The voice of the base, the AI made by a techhead with too many hours on his hands, speaks in a soft, nudging voice.

“ _You will die, if you attempt to stay in the Jaeger yourself._ ”

She barely feels herself move to give her response. “ _I just did_.”

Vision keeps asking her to move, to take one step more. He has always been gentle, and Wanda has never been as thankful as she thought towards the AI then. She could not feel. Not then. Too soon, too torn, too ripped apart by an angry burning loss that no words could ever define. But Vision spoke gently, teasing her back to herself, and helped her balance the Jaeger enough as she walked back to base.

 

* * *

 

They have to cut her from the Jaeger.  The tearing ruined circuits and wires, cabling and struts, and they cut through to her with a blowtorch and a grinder. Wanda is slumped, still, in her harness. She cannot stand. She cannot care. She is too tired and lost even to grieve, and after she has been checked over in medical and found to be “ _strained, but otherwise fine_ ” she is carried back to her room by one of Max Them OFF’s engineers.

She does not move from her room. She sits in Pietro’s bunk, the top bunk, and curls into the corner where she used to settle after nightmares. She sinks so deeply into her mind that she swears she can feel Pietro’s presence beside her, feel his hand stroking her hair, and the soft voices on the periphery of her perception grow more rough and more concerned. Wanda cannot bring herself to care.

She eats, when food is left for her. Pretends Pietro is there, nudging her to eat, until the falsehood causes such an ache of loss she curls in the bottom of the shower and weeps.

They were twins. They had always had each other, always relied on each other. They had come into the world together, and sworn they would leave it so. The tears on her cheeks are warm, with loss and sorrow and grief and concepts no language she knows can explain. She has lost someone who was a part of her in the way no other ever has been or could ever be, and lost them, not just physically, but mentally too, felt his mind torn screaming from hers.

( _nononoWandapleasenonoNONONON-_ )

The first week or so she refuses all contact. People would come in and leave a tray, once, twice, thrice a day. What she ate was pitiful. When she slept, it was fitful. And every morning on waking she would weep.

 

* * *

 

After the first week, she refuses all food.

She does not mean to starve herself. She simply does not touch it. When others – engineers, medics, techheads, anyone – try to tease her to eat she turns her face to the wall and ignores them. After a few days the smell of food turns her stomach, and she hides under a blanket when the tray is still fresh. Pietro’s pillow still smells of him, so she curls with her scarlet blanket and his blue pillow on his top bunk, and pretends the rest of the world does not exist.

This goes on for near three days before Vision speaks.

“ _Miss Maximoff you really ought to eat._ ”

She snorts into the wall, where she is curled. “And if I don’t?”

Vision is quiet for a while, before he speaks, but when he speaks, she listens. “If you do not eat I will not tell you what you and your brother’s brain scans looked like when you first initiated the Neural Handshake.” The AI is quiet for a few moments, but when she does not respond he speaks again, “It was quite unlike any other.”

Wanda’s voice is a small, hopeful thing. “You have that?”

“I have all the files, Miss Maximoff.” His voice sounds vaguely amused. “I do run much of this base after all.”

She does not need to speak as she drops from the bunk, pads to the tray, and picks up the apple. The first bite is a doleful _crunch_ but with the first taste she remembers why she loves apples, and stands there with the juice on her chin letting the memory of the first apple Pietro had thieved fill her mind.

And then she takes another bite.

Vision does not disturb her as she eats the apple, down to its core. Nor as she eats the sandwich, drinks the soup and the water, and eats the small yoghurt that had all been set on the tray in hope of teasing her to eat. But she eats it all, and when she finishes, and crosses to the computer terminal in the corner of the room, the scans of her and Pietro’s brains await her on the screen. Separate, distant, apart. Similar in some ways, but distinct.

Then they start to move.

“This is your brains in the moments before.” Vision’s voice is gentle, and quiet, as the brain scans move and dance on the screen. “Separate, and unlinked, your brother and you shared many similarities. We expected this to be a smooth Handshake.”

On the screen the brains start to change.

“This is what happened as the Handshake was initiated.”

On the screen the dancing colours of Pietro’s and Wanda’s mind suddenly slip together. Colour where there is colour, no colour where there is not, they fill each other’s gaps, and slip together smoothly like two puzzle pieces, like building blocks, like when they had embraced or held hands. Like they were meant to, as though nature had intended it to be so. There are tears on Wanda’s cheeks, but, for once since her brother was ripped from the Jaeger, she is not crying.

“It was the smoothest Handshake any one had ever seen. I checked the scans with ones from other Jaeger pilots, but none, even the Triplets, slipped together quite like that. It’s rather extraordinary.”

Wanda’s fingers stretch out and trace the screen, trace the blue lights marking where her brother’s thought patterns show up in hers, and the scarlet marking where her thoughts how up in his. There is something hypnotic in the patterns they make, something calming, and Wanda is not sure how long she sits there before she realises the clip is repeating.

She must have startled in some way because Vision speaks again. “I’m sorry,” he says. “This clip is only a few minutes long.”

“Are there others?”

“Some,” Vision says. “Including ones you would not want to see. I was still in contact with Max’s system when Ultron- the Kaiju…”

He trails off, and Wanda has never been quite so grateful for the AI’s sense of tact before.

 

* * *

 

 

It is later – much later with dinner come and gone – and Wanda is sitting by the screen again, watching clips of sparring matches with Pietro. These are among the few videos relating to her brother Vision will let her look at, those he has deemed to be unlikely to send her dissociating or otherwise into grief again.

“Vision?” she asks, and her tone is almost absent in its thoughtfulness.

“Miss Maximoff?”

“You said you were in contact with Max’s systems. Could you track the wreckage of…,” Wanda trails off. How can she phrase the request that might find her brother’s body?

“I can try,” Vision says. “I cannot promise anything.”

“Never promise,” Wanda says. “But if you can find him it would mean the world to me.”

 

* * *

 

Wanda has gone through all the clips for the umpteenth time the next day when she asks to help Vision in the search. The AI tries to explain that it’s not quite as simple as tracking signals or data, that it requires understanding ocean currents and collating the information into a coherent image, and Wanda offers again.

“Please,” she says. “Pietro is _my_ _twin_.”

She is grateful that Vision does not try to make her change present tense to past.

 

* * *

 

In the end, Pietro finds them, after a fashion.

They have tracked the general region the waves might have taken her brother, but not yet found the beach. With the deaths of Kaiju up and down the coast and the destruction they wreak beaches become cliffs, cliffs become beaches, rocky shores become smooth sand and vice versa. Amongst all are found wrecks and remains besides, and tracking new arrivals is not always the easiest.

Wanda is grateful for all the beach combers to exist when one finds her brother, still in his suit, still spasming and seizing from the aftershocks of the circuits of his suit burning their way into his skin.

 

* * *

 

“Pietro,” Wanda says, as soon as they let her see him. “I’m here,” she murmurs. The doctors have said he was delirious, muttering and murmuring of memories they both shared and Wanda knows as instinct what they know as experience. Her brother needs a face to anchor himself as _himself_. She holds his hand, watches his gaze, her brown into his blue as her brother finds himself amongst the chaotic fragments of his mind.

There is the slight burn of acid on her hand, but mild like an antbite and she ignores it. Pietro is watching her, going from confused to intense, and Wanda lets herself smile. “You’re safe,” she promises. “You’re _alive_.” She lets her hand lift, lets it comb through his stress-greyed hair, and ignores the blue branded into the circuit lines on his arm. She feels Pietro relax even as his eyes drift shut.

 

* * *

 

Pietro sleeps and Wanda takes her brother in. His hair is greyer now than ever, and he had been greying since they were ten. There are lines on his face that Wanda think come from pain, and his lips are chapped by salt. On his arms, all the way down to his hands held in hers, are trails of Kaiju blue. Wanda does not know how it has stained his skin and yet not killed him, and cannot help but be grateful. She considers her own scars, where her suit branded her.

“Vision?” she asks, and her voice is soft. “The circuit-brands. Do they match?”

There is a brief moment before the AI responds, and Wanda supposes it is to run a comparison based on whatever glimpses he has gained through cameras.

“I believe so,” he says eventually. “In all except colour. His are blue where yours are red.”

Wanda settles into her chair and smiles. It is aimed equally at the camera in the corner of the room and at her sleeping brother, and at last she lets herself be at peace.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated!


End file.
